GREEN BAY — Joe and Susan Bashta traveled all the way from Australia for something they could find only in Green Bay.

It was an autism school, the like of which exists nowhere else on the planet. And it’s having success where others have failed.

“We are discovering our son for the first time in 13 years,” Joe Bashta said.

Isaac Bashta, 13, has a form of autism as well as a genetic disorder that prevents him from being able to speak, gives him little ability to control his own limbs. In a classroom setting back in his hometown of Melbourne, you might have seen Isaac writhing on his back, screaming, kicking a wall and slapping himself — and it was getting worse, Bashta said.

“He was getting more and more aggressive, upset,” Bashta said.

Contrast that with the boy’s demeanor one day a couple weeks ago, when he had a one-on-one session with teacher Erika Anderson at her Green Bay School, ACE Teaching & Consulting. The session was a continuation of a section Isaac and his classmates have been working on in the field of business, in which they have been developing a make-believe cleaning service, so they could learn about budgeting, profit-and-loss and other practical lessons.

This particular day, Isaac was tasked with developing a company profile for their company, which Isaac had named “The Artists of Shine.”

Wearing a set of headphones to block out distracting noises and chewing on a chew-straw attached by lanyard to his shirt, Isaac calmly dictated the following, one letter at a time:

“With living such busy lives, having a company that is trustworthy, goes above and beyond and can make your home shine like a piece of art is key to your happiness. We have many years of experience and our small staff of myself, Will and Luke really hope to have your business. We serve only the Green Bay area.”

Truth be told, Isaac kind of missed the boat on this one. It was supposed to be a company profile, and instead, he was putting out ad copy. What’s more, when he got stuck on part of it, he tried to coax Anderson into filling in the blank for him, which she declined to do.

“He’s a 13-year-old boy,” Anderson smiled, by way of explanation.

Well, he didn’t exactly follow the assignment, but it was a far cry from slapping himself, screaming and kicking a wall.

Isaac wrote that stuff, or at least dictated it — even the part about trying to coax some help from the teacher.

A new approach

It’s all part of an autism training approach called Rapid Prompting Method, RPM. It was developed not quite two decades ago by Soma Mukhopadhyay, an immigrant to the U.S. from India, a scientist and mother of an autistic son, who developed it into a business in Austin, Texas, seven years ago.

The program is most often associated with a system in which autistic students are taught to point to letters on a letterboard so they can spell things out.

Students who can’t control their limbs can’t easily point to whatever they want, but RPM is incremental: They start out pointing to one side or the other of a two-choice board — yes-no, big-little, up-down — and, when they get to the point of being able to make the correct choices, the chart becomes finer and more complex until it eventually includes a small alphabet.

Isaac works with a stencil board; the letters are negative spaces, and he must put the point of a pencil inside each of the letters he chooses before Anderson formally recognizes the selection.

Anderson’s job is to jot down the letters as they come up and to keep up a rapid patter of encouragement, prompts and whatever else it takes to keep the easily distracted Isaac on task.

“That doesn’t make sense, Isaac, go again,” she orders as he struggles one letter at a time. “Go again. Go, go, go. Now you’ve touched three things. Do it again. Keep going. Nice! Good reaching! You’re there!”

It’s not like Isaac is cured or better or anything. His disabilities are his disabilities. But as far as Joe and Susan Bashta are concerned, this is the first time their boy has been involved in a program that presupposes he has at least average intelligence and tries to tap into it without taking his behavioral lapses as anything but a momentary obstacle to be worked around.

The letterboard is just part of the overall difference RPM has from other approaches.

“While most programs are waiting for speech to happen, and discard intelligence, RPM presumes intelligence because speech and language areas are in different parts of the brain,” Soma Mukhopadhyay explained in an email interview with the Press-Gazette.”

“RPM is an individualized educational program where the teacher identifies the open learning channels of the student to teach the topic,” she wrote. “So a visual student will learn geometry concepts using visual skills of looking at the diagram while a tactile student will learn geometry concepts using his touch … The teacher uses different ‘sensory activities’ to teach the student who may not be able to visually focus.”

As Isaac gets more skilled at picking out his letters, he’ll graduate to a laminated plastic board on which the letters are positive shapes. The goal is independence, whether it involves the student holding his own letterboard or handwriting, or a keyboard or whatever it takes to allow the most open-ended communication possible.

“It’s not just all about this magical board,” Anderson said. “That’s really just the method of how we engage the student, and that’s what makes it so successful. There are kids who come in where I don’t even hold the board; it just sits on the table. Or we’re doing handwriting. Or speech. As long as it’s purposeful.”

Getting to know Isaac

For Isaac, this whole new world started with an RPM teacher from Mukhopadhyay’s school visiting Australia. After pulling Isaac from his traditional autism classwork, Susan Bashta began researching heavily and learned of RPM, which was only available in the U.S. The Bashtas and seven other sets of Australian parents of autistic children pooled their money and brought in representatives of Mukhopadhyay’s school.

With the parents watching on closed circuit television, the teacher worked with the students one-on-one. When Isaac’s turn came up, he wasn’t happy about it.

“Isaac was very upset, hitting himself and screaming,” Susan Bashta recalled. “The teacher said, ‘Isaac, I know you’re in there. I just want to help.’ It was the first time anyone treated him with dignity.”

Isaac was indeed “in there.” Before the session ended, the teacher read him an Aesop’s fable about a wolf with a bone stuck in his throat and asked him, “How would you feel with a bone in your throat?” Isaac spelled out the word “hurt.”

Their brief experience with Mukhopadhyay’s program convinced them they needed to move to the U.S. The problem was, Mukhopadhyay’s school in Austin had a two-year waiting list.

Mukhopadhyay has so far trained just 11 instructors around the world, and Erika Anderson happens to be one of them. In fact, she was Mukhopadhyay’s first trainee, and she spent three years shadowing the instructor all over the world to learn her methods.

All of the certified instructors hold workshops at their home headquarters and abroad, but Anderson also holds a daylong session, a whole school day of classwork in a single place, under the umbrella of the RPM methodology, and she’s the only one in the world doing it.

That’s what brought the Bashtas from Melbourne to Green Bay. Joe Bashta owns an artificial intelligence business that he can operate from anywhere in the world, and so it was a relatively simple matter to pull up stakes and move his family to Wisconsin.

They did it 21 months ago, and “we’ve had no regrets,” Susan Bashta said. “We made the right decision.”

Since arriving in Green Bay in January 2017 and enrolling Isaac in the full-time program, the Bashtas have learned their boy loves art and music and hopes someday to work with horses — none of which they knew from his previous 12 years of life.

One other thing they learned about him: He was in pain. Through his newfound communication skills, he was able to tell them he had pain in his back, something he had been living with but could never tell anyone about. He has since been able to receive treatment for it.

Program is still growing

Anderson’s school works regularly with about 40 students through short, weekly sessions and scheduled camps, and she and her staff work with countless others when they take their program on the road once a month. So far, in her daylong classroom session, she has just four students, all four families of which came from outside the Green Bay area. The Bashtas are the only ones so far who came all the way from the other side of the world, but a family they know in Perth, Australia, will soon be moving to Green Bay to take advantage of Anderson’s classes.

RPM is still a new thing, and as such, it’s not without controversy.

“There’s a reason RPM is not the gold standard” for teaching autistic students, said Amy Campbell, who co-owns ACE with Anderson and serves as the school’s business manager. “It’s so new, there’s no scientific research to validate it. Soma hasn’t taken it through any validation study. In the eyes of the autism community, this is still controversial. But we just look at it as teaching.”

RPM differs from other systems in that it starts with the assumption that all of its students are capable of learning, Campbell said.

“We’re not saying they are all little geniuses trapped inside these bodies, just that they’re capable of learning, if someone can sit down and figure out how they learn,” she said. “So it’s one-on-one. A key cornerstone of autism is you’ll see different motor difficulties. It varies. Maybe the student can’t grab anything. Or they’ll slap someone. They’re easily distracted, easily taken off track. ‘Stimming,’ they call it — the regulatory things they do to keep their bodies calm, some external thing, like rocking, flapping. Every kid with autism has stims.

“RPM looks at those things, looks at accommodations to make it easier for them to learn. One big thing is, often they don’t have an output method like speech. Some talk, but it’s not purposeful.”

The letterboard ends up being the most common output method the school uses, Campbell said.

Whether it’s been scientifically validated or not, parents of the students going through ACE have watched their kids succeed, and that’s plenty of validation enough, at least for Melanie Sheppard, whose boy, Will, has been with Anderson’s program the longest.

In fact, Melanie Sheppard is the one who talked Anderson into starting a full-time program in the first place. She and her husband, Andrew Sheppard, were living in Iowa about five years ago when they learned of RPM and Anderson. They started bringing Will to two-week sessions that Anderson offered.

“At that very first camp, he spelled out one of the colors of the flag,” Melanie Sheppard recalled. “I had no clue he knew that. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was blown away.”

The family started coming for entire summers so Will could get as much training as possible.

Then, one summer, Anderson and Campbell had to be gone for part of the summer session, for one of their out-of-state demonstration sessions, and Will was heartbroken. When they returned, he spelled out on the letterboard: “I thought you were not coming back.”

As soon as she could persuade Anderson to start a full-time program, the Sheppards moved to Green Bay to enroll Will in it.

Like the Bashtas, it was almost like they were meeting their own son for the first time.

“Will would spend all day playing with an iPad and watching TV,” Melanie said. “That’s all he would do. I bought millions of dollars’ worth of toys, but he never played with them. I didn’t understand the motor skills problem.”

Now, after three years of working with Anderson, this boy with motor skills problems has demonstrated a huge interest in art, and he can color neatly within the lines of an intricate color-by-number picture.

A friendly chat

On this particular day, he sat at a table coloring on the work and munching frozen green beans — those and ice cubes seem to calm him down, his mother said — as he participated in a round-table “social session” with Isaac Bashta and Brady Accette, another autistic young man.

With Anderson providing stenographer duties, the three autistic students spelled out a conversation on letterboards. Anderson hoped they’d continue a discussion of their fictional cleaning business, but the three had minds of their own.

“Thanks Brady for joining us,” Will spelled out on the letterboard. “Do you like our press?” This after showing no sign whatsoever that he had even noticed a visiting reporter and videographer from the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

“I brought them to show off our minds,” Isaac spelled out, the first indication he gave that he had been paying attention at all when a reporter had visited him and his parents at their home a few days earlier.

“I can say it is very impressive,” Brady added. “There should be more knowledge about what we can do.”

The conversation continued in round-robin fashion, with Brady periodically leaping to his feet and walking off nervous energy, Isaac slapping himself on the back of the neck and chewing on his chew straw and Will munching green beans and coloring, none of them really making eye contact with each other or anyone else in the room.

Isaac told the others he had been at an educational disadvantage in Australia, where no such program for autism exists.

“It is a lot better here,” he said.

Brady thought so, too. “I know when I was younger not many people believed in me. Finally I found my saving grace in a school who did. That made a difference.”

Will expressed hope that it eventually would lead people to grow more accepting of those with autism.

Just three buddies sitting around the table having a chat. Until Isaac decided it had gone on long enough.